Arleen Thukral's Journey: From STEM Student to HTM Professional

Curious about how a love for medicine and engineering can shape a groundbreaking career in healthcare technology management (HTM)? Meet Arleen Thukral, a trailblazer whose journey from a middle school science enthusiast to a key player in the HTM industry is nothing short of inspiring. In this episode of "HTM on the Line," Arleen shares her experiences, insights on achieving a healthy work-life balance in hybrid environments, and her vision for the future of the HTM industry.   Don’t miss this enriching conversation filled with practical advice and forward-looking perspectives from Arleen Thukral.

"We are immensely grateful to our sponsors—The College of Biomedical Equipment Technology, A.M. Bickford, PM Biomedical and Talent Exclusive—for their support in making this podcast possible. Their dedication to advancing the HTM industry is truly commendable. For more information about their contributions and services, please visit their websites:

• The College of Biomedical Equipment Technology
• A.M. Bickford
• Talent Exclusive
• PM Biomedical

Transcript

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 0:01

Welcome to another episode of HTM on the Line with Brian Hawkins Sr. This week's episode, we are joined by Arlene Tukau, a self-motivated professional whose remarkable journey in the healthcare technology management industry was all inspired by her passion for both medicine and engineering. All inspired by her passion for both medicine and engineering. Arlene shares her insights on navigating the fast-paced world of HTM, the joys and challenges of working in a hybrid environment, and her vision for the industry's future, reflecting on her diverse experiences living and working across the United States. Whether you're an aspiring HTM professional, a seasoned veteran or simply curious about the field, arlene's journey offers valuable lessons and inspiration. Let's get into this week's episode with Arlene Takal. Welcome, arlene.

Arleen Thukral 1:26

Glad to have you on HTM on the Line? How are you doing this evening? I'm great, thank you for having me, byron.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 1:29

Oh man, it's great. I mean, it's been a long time in the making. I'm glad we finally can lock down some time to have a little conversation. And first off, let's just get right into it. I mean, this is the question everyone probably asks when you get on the podcast. Into it? This is the question everyone probably asks when you get on the podcast. So I'll ask it also Can you share your journey into the healthcare technology management industry with me and what inspired you to pursue this career?

Arleen Thukral 1:59

So I'll go back all the way to middle school. I actually did a fun with the DNA camp and you know I was very fascinated with science and I also did a bop ball robotics course with Lockheed Martin. So I kind of had these two passions. One was kind of medicine and the other was engineering. One was kind of medicine and the other was engineering. And as I started to try to choose a major, I came upon biomedical engineering as the intersection between those two. And then, you know, love my coursework.

Arleen Thukral 2:46

And later in college, through the Career Center at RPI, I learned about clinical engineering, specifically the VA technical career field program. So I was really fortunate to join the VA and get a great mentor to have introduced me to the Milwaukee VA and learn the ropes. And I honestly loved the fast pace of, you know, getting that instant gratification when you implement a new technology in a hospital or with interacting with the clinicians. And you know I was definitely looking to do something slightly different than my thesis, which was in tissue engineering and, you know, definitely more head down and like working on something for a very long time. And what excited me about the career field was that it was a faster pace than the research side the research side.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 3:48

All right, that's now. You mentioned middle school. You was in this program, so that was kind of like I guess, a STEM program you would say he was involved with it was just like a summer camp at that point.

Arleen Thukral 3:57

But yeah, I was. I was very much into like chemistry. I even took AP chemistry as a sophomore, so I just really enjoyed like science fairs and all of that.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 4:10

Okay, let's say all right. So just to cause most people you meet, they never heard of the HTM industry. You found out about that when you was in college, or did you find out about that while you was in high school?

Arleen Thukral 4:42

No, in college you mentioned a manager at Fresno, va, and from that very beginning I, you know, really loved building, you know, and what I mean by building is, you know, finding expertise in the team and making sure that you know, we're leveraging their talents and creating new positions in the department to grow the department. So you know, I was the first engineer at that facility and you know so I was kind of doing the role of an engineer while being a manager and so kind of the evolution was to learn from being kind of like the technical SME to learning to be somebody that builds teams, to then, you know, taking it a step further and being a regional role. Then, you know, taking it a step further and being a regional role, that's when I went to the Northwest in Seattle and worked alongside another regional chief and I started to conduct program assessments of the VAs up there and building a work group to work on alternative equipment maintenance. So that was interesting because that was like learning to be an influencer and being more forward looking, so trying to make, you know, decisions that were forecasting one to two years ahead.

Arleen Thukral 6:20

There's more about conveying ideas and communication. It was more about conveying ideas and communication and then moving on to an even bigger scale. Being a chief regional manager, I was really attracted to again building the team and that's both through hiring and through growing the people on the team. And in this region in New York and New Jersey we have a service line set up so it's much more possible through the consolidated service line to implement big changes, like we implemented on-call program several years ago and we've moved forward to implement a modern CMS. So definitely it's become a focus from being an SME to being focusing on interpersonal skills and leadership and kind of evolving to grow people.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 7:28

I love when I hear leaders talk about the pleasure and joy they get out of helping that next generation. Now, arlene, I'm sitting here listening to you, and let's try to put this timeline in a box here. I've heard you mention Milwaukee, seattle, new York, new Jersey, so it seems like you've kind of traveled around the country a little bit, have you?

Arleen Thukral 7:53

Yeah, I was very comfortable with, you know, living in a new place, given that I myself am an immigrant. I was born in India and moved to America when I was nine, so I definitely am kind of comfortable with going to a new place and getting a bearings there, and I guess I always thought it was exciting to have the job take me somewhere new. So I was always willing to apply for that next step and in a new place All right.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 8:30

Without making someone upset, I won't say what's the best place you work, but what's the? What would you say was your most favorite city you've lived in since you've been in the States?

Arleen Thukral 8:39

Yeah, oh, that's so hard to um. Well, I love the outdoors and I really did get to explore both California and um Seattle area, um, and the national parks there. So, honestly, I can't pick um there's. Each place has its pros and cons and, um, you know, it was a joy to get to explore each place I've lived okay, great now now.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 9:11

Are you full-time in-house or you were both how you, how you work? What's your work schedule like?

Arleen Thukral 9:20

um. So currently my work schedule is hybrid, so I go in two days a week and I work from home three days a week.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 9:28

OK, now what are some of the biggest challenges, I guess, and benefits you may experience from working in a hybrid role?

Arleen Thukral 9:49

that it's an intro mix. So when I go into the office at the VISN I get to interact with the quality management staff and the chief medical officer. We actually have two different VISN offices in this region, so not all of the VISN staff are co-located. My direct reports, for example, are at other locations. So it's you know I've always loved the going on site visits to the facilities and you get to observe so much more in person. I think everyone says this.

Arleen Thukral 10:22

You know, the biggest challenge of remote is that you don't have those body cues, so you have to rely a lot on the verbal response that you're getting. At least, the culture in my vision is to not do much video sharing unless you're presenting. So I would say that you know my team is great and we've come up with pretty good communication methods. So we use Microsoft Teams chat a lot. So we have our own Teams chat that we use. We also get together with regular huddles and we do like an annual dinner with regular huddles and we do like an annual dinner.

Arleen Thukral 11:12

We try to set up meetings based on the schedules. So you know like whenever there's something new we have to work on like a strategic planning session. We try not to do a summit where you might have to get everyone to sit down for, you know, three to four hours. Instead, we'll kind of try to knock out a big topic within an hour, an hour and a half, and schedule more meetings, and that way people can come back with fresh ideas as well. And you know, we I find that it works to be more effective that way, especially with a smaller team now, and I think that, yeah, another benefit is increased productivity. I personally, you know, find that commuting can be stressful and not to mention it's an environmental impact. So I like that we're getting the benefit in a hybrid format of, like interacting a few times a week and then also a benefit of increased productivity and, you know, working from home during the remote times.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 12:23

Wow, that's man. You covered about six questions. I was thinking about asking you, but now HTM week just passed and you mentioned how your team is spread out. So how did y'all celebrate? Did you just have to go to each account celebrate with each one? So did y'all come together? How did you go about celebrating HTM week? Just curious.

Arleen Thukral 12:45

Yeah. So lots of facility departments celebrated in different ways. Like at the Finger Lakes they did a booth where they did kind of like a little cookout but also had a booth where customers could come learn, scan a QR code and get questions answered. Um, so they got a lot of great FaceTime. They took a picture with the director.

Arleen Thukral 13:08

Um, at the Northport facility we were able to join in a wins and woes exercise and kind of just um, they did a lot of fun questions where they, um, kind of you know, talked about people's favorite summertime activities and different things. In my team we kind of I asked everybody to tell me about their kind of at least a story about their first year in HTM and if they had like a photo or notes or something to share. So that was a really fun thing to kind of reflect back with the nostalgia and yeah, I got some funny stories out of that and yeah, it's it's. I think for those types of meetings we try to definitely do the video sharing because it's more fun that way. We also have the network director send out a really nice thank you message to the HTM staff and you know definitely lots of like quizzes and things that National does as well, and lots of fun activities, things that national does as well, and lots of fun activities.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 14:26

Yeah, that's great and I know a lot of things we did during HTM week. I tried to invite on the vice president, general manager that's one of the beautiful parts of having teams, like when we all was eating lunch. I said the invite. They was able to call in, wish the team happy HTM week and things.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 14:47

But I love the idea about you letting them talk about their first year in the HTM industry, because I personally believe that's one of the greatest accomplishments when you get hired into this industry. That's one of your great career moments. So most people usually have a story about their first time or first year in the industry, because that's like a altering move for someone's career when they come into the industry. And then that second one always happens when they fall in love with what they do. And from listening to you, I can feel the passion you have for what you do and that's to be commended. But what I want to ask you also excuse me, you work hybrid. How do you think working hybrid can bring an impact on patient care efficiency in the hospitals? Do you see a benefit coming from that or an impact on patient care while you work in hybrid?

Balancing Work-Life in HTM Industry

Arleen Thukral 15:54

Yeah, I definitely think that we have a lot of remote technologies that we can leverage, especially with clinical systems that are on virtual servers. So there's definitely been a focus when I started to set up virtual farms on each of our facilities. Actually, pretty recently this year we were able to partner with O. You can remote into dashboards like this that let you monitor your RAM usage, your bandwidth and kind of troubleshoot things remotely. And we have on-call setup for our Complexity One facilities. So we definitely encourage call setup for our complexity one facilities. So we definitely encourage our staff that are rotating on call to, you know, utilize remote services to troubleshoot if they, because that will actually sometimes lead to faster response. So you know, it's definitely a more connected world where you can expand upon the administrative capabilities of the HTM staff and like have them dive deeper into potential problems, sometimes even before they occur, because you can even set up the email notifications, like I was saying about the monitoring the RAM usage. Like I was saying about the monitoring the RAM usage.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 17:45

Let's kind of switch it up a little. You touched on your travels and living in different cities. How do you because this is a huge thing now and not just our industry but I guess across the board how do you have a healthy work-life balance, living doing a hybrid work schedule, but just pretty much, how do you balance your work life schedule?

Arleen Thukral 18:08

yeah, I mean I um like to have like an organized workspace and um this year in particular, I'm focusing more on organization. So to me that means you set your goals right and that's where the strategic planning comes in. So you know, you get all of your team involved and you come up with what are going to be your priorities as a team. You make sure you define, you know the roles and how everyone is contributing to that. You know I actually try to give guidelines to my staff so that they know how I would prioritize something too. So you know, is this a hard deadline to be met? Can extensions be requested? Is there a long term impact for not getting something done? You know, are there regulatory impacts? Are there impacts to patient safety? So, like you know, are there multiple facilities involved? So that kind of thing helps me prioritize.

Arleen Thukral 19:14

And I go back to this organization answer, because I think you know it's really easy when you're working partly remote is that you have that bleed through of different aspects of your personal and you know work and you just work too much. So you know, by having the VA is really great at this, they have, they give you work phones. The VA is really great at this. They give you work phones, and so that's great because I can separate that work and personal life. In fact, they put in a rule this year that you cannot travel with your work phone internationally, so that's improved that even further.

Arleen Thukral 20:07

But yeah, I would say that it's important to you know, I've always been somebody that kind of easily will do the back to back meetings and forget about lunch. So I just try to again have an organized desk, bring snacks to my desk at the start of the day, knowing that I might not be able to step away, but I'm very good about not checking email after the workday is done. I would rather work longer just to get stuff done. And again, because I have prioritized, I know that I'm working on the most important thing first.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 20:53

Working with the VA, I know it's a little different than working at any other hospital system. So I guess this can be a twofold question. First, what tips could you give other VA HTM professionals who may be considering getting into a hybrid role like what you're doing? And after you answer that one, maybe you can give some advice to non-VA professionals also, because I know VA have different guidelines. But what could you give to an HTM professional in the VA system who may be considering getting into your position?

Arleen Thukral 21:33

Sure, I would say stay connected. So what I mean by that is you know I have 130 collaborators in my position. You know that I'm interacting with through either email, chat, meetings throughout, you know, a few times a month. So because there's so many different players that you're involved with whether they be, you know, the business staff, national staff, external vendors, your team it's really important that you're responsive. So having a way of you know taking notes, whether it's one note or some other method of note taking taking and again organizing yourself. So there's tons of ways to be organized in email.

Arleen Thukral 22:24

But I said, stay connected because you want to be responsive to people and you know it builds your reputation to be responsive and you know I always tend to on the on the side of over communication. So if I know I need a little bit more time on something, I would, I will request, you know, some an extension in order to communicate that I'm working on something and it'll be done soon. And you have to set goals. So you know we in HTM do a great job of continuous learning, but I think by setting those goals, you're able to again prioritize and achieve what you consider to be the most important.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 23:13

How do you see your role evolving in the HTM industries, let's say in the next two years, because it's not going to be the same way it is today, two years from now. So do you see some ways it may be evolving into a different type or maybe expanding more?

Arleen Thukral 23:31

Yeah, absolutely. I mean at the regional level, that's something we're always trying to push is getting things to be better. So one example would be we have network medical devices, but I think the SAS products are really where things are going next. So having data from a remote facility that is being reviewed or cross-read by a provider elsewhere. So I think we have a greater need for Tier 1 and Tier 2 support models, similar to OIT within HTM. So we'll need to start writing procedures around.

Arleen Thukral 24:11

You know what is the scope of each of these tiered supports, based on what part of the system that they're responsible for. Another thing that I'm really excited about would be potentially having large-language models incorporated into our CMMSs. I don't know if that'll be in the next two years, because I think that we have pretty poor quality documentation still in the field, but right now, you know, I would like to move towards getting parts documentation better documented so that we could, you know, ideally have the CMMS, like suggesting what part might be helpful for a certain work order, and you know really amazing things like that going forward.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 25:03

Do you see any type of way, in your opinion, that we may be able to not solve it, but maybe go into the right direction of at least catching up to the staffing issues that we all are facing? Do you have any suggestions or ideas you think can be helpful that you might be able to share?

Arleen Thukral 25:26

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know if we can, you know, get more people into the field that have experience. I think that will remain a challenge. But I think what we can work on is how do we train those people that are new to the field faster and more efficiently and, to, you know, create a tool for that. In Visin2, we've worked on a knowledge-based power app. For that. In VISN 2, we've worked on a knowledge-based power app.

Arleen Thukral 26:01

So it's kind of like a repository where our technical experts have created knowledge articles and so they basically, you know, write down and document the good things that you need to know to troubleshoot a clinical system or a medical device. So it's a little bit different than a service manual, because it's kind of the real world things that are particular to the environment where it's deployed. And, of course, in the VA there's a lot of VA specific processes. So, you know, again, it's like truly the most useful thing that new people will need to know. So we have, you know, over 500 views of this resource already and every month we get at least 10 articles added. So it's a lot of great progress being made with these POCs that have been creating these technical resources and it's kind of like a Google search. So anything, any word in the article or the title of the article will bring up the relevant based on the keyword that's been searched. And you know people have given really good feedback in terms of, you know, utilizing it and thus gotten involved in writing articles as well.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 27:27

Are you attending any shows coming up soon?

Arleen Thukral 27:31

Yeah, I'll be at Amy this June, very excited.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 27:35

Are you presenting or just attending?

Arleen Thukral 27:38

Yes, I'm presenting with Alicia Smith's Freshwater and we're actually going to be talking about improving your interpersonal skills to succeed in leadership roles. So I just wanted to put a quick plug in.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 27:52

Okay, what day are you speaking and what time?

Arleen Thukral 27:55

On Monday at 8 am, we'll be talking about self-limiting habits and how to mitigate them.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 28:04

Now, always in each podcast, I ask my guests if there's something encouraging or motivating you could share with the HTM industry, because everyone unfortunately doesn't have that passion or drive for the industry like maybe yourself have. And is there something you could tell maybe a young HTM professional who's in the industry, some encouraging words or advice you could share with them?

Arleen Thukral 28:35

Yeah, I would say this industry is really exciting because it's young and evolving. You know, even Amy is growing as an institution. You know, with the development of Amy Array, and I would say being in the technology space is so interesting because you know even the way that we're working now with. You know Zoom and leveraging, like new ways of doing things, it's not the same. I remember when I started. I remember when I started. Things have changed within this timeframe as well and I think that anyone that works with technology kind of go into management and think about processes and how to improve processes. So there's a lot of different avenues in the industry and I would say, you know, find what excites you in terms of is it like the details or is it the bigger picture thinking, and try to try to find the role that fits that.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 30:06

One thing I want to say is great to have you on the show, arlene. I appreciate you taking the time to come hang out with me for a few. I look forward to seeing you at. Amy, and once again, what is your presentation title?

Arleen Thukral 30:19

Improving your Interpersonal Skills to Succeed in Leadership Roles.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 30:24

And she'll be at Amy Monday 8 am, which is 11 am Eastern time. So if you're from the East Coast, you shouldn't have no problem getting up for eight o'clock. Thank you again, Arlene, and look forward to seeing you and Amy next week. Take care.

Arleen Thukral 30:39

Thank you, thank you so much for the opportunity.

Bryant Hawkins Sr. 30:44

Thank you for joining us on this episode of HTM On the Line with Brian Hawkins Sr. A special thanks to Arlene Takau for sharing her remarkable journey and invaluable insights into the healthcare technology management industry. We hope our story has inspired you to embrace new opportunities and pursue excellence in your career. Remember to stay connected, keep learning and never stop pushing the boundaries of what's possible in HTM. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share with your colleagues. Until next time, keep striving for greatness and making a positive impact in the world of healthcare technology management. Y'all be safe out there.